pacman::p_load(DT, ggiraph,
patchwork, plotly,
tidyverse) Hands-on Ex 03: Interactivity in Visual Analytics: Principles and Methods
1.0 Overview
In this hands on exercise 3, we will be learning Chapter 3 and 4 of R for Visual Analytics. For Part I, we will focus on creating interactive data visualisation by using functions provided by ggiraph and plotly packages. For Part II, we will focus on learning how to create animated data visualisation by using gganimate and plotly r packages. At the same time, we will also learn how to (i) reshape data by using tidyr package, and (ii) process, wrangle and transform data by using dplyr package.
2.0 Part I - Programming Interactive Data Visualisation with R
2.1 Getting Started
First, write a code chunk to check, install and launch the following R packages:
DT: provides an R interface to the JavaScript library DataTables that create interactive table on html page.
ggiraph: for making ‘ggplot’ graphics interactive.
patchwork: for combining multiple ggplot2 graphs into one figure.
plotly: R library for plotting interactive statistical graphs.
tidyverse: a family of modern R packages specially designed to support data science, analysis and communication task including creating static statistical graphs.
The code chunk below will be used to accomplish the task.
2.2 Importing Data
In this section, Exam_data.csv provided will be used. Using read_csv() of readr package, import Exam_data.csv into R.
The code chunk below read_csv() of readr package is used to import Exam_data.csv data file into R and save it as an tibble data frame called exam_data.
exam_data <- read_csv("data/Exam_data.csv")2.3 Interactive Data Visualisation - ggiraph methods
2.3.1 Tooltip effect with tooltip aesthetic
Below shows a typical code chunk to plot an interactive statistical graph by using ggiraph package. Notice that the code chunk consists of two parts. First, an ggplot object will be created. Next, girafe() of ggiraph will be used to create an interactive svg object.
p <- ggplot(exam_data,
aes(x = MATHS)) +
geom_dotplot_interactive(
aes(tooltip = ID),
stackgroups = TRUE,
binwidth = 1,
method = "histodot") +
scale_y_continuous(NULL,
breaks = NULL)
girafe(
ggobj = p,
width_svg = 6,
height_svg = 6*0.618
)Notice that two steps are involved. First, an interactive version of ggplot2 geom i.e. geom_dotplot_interactive() will be used to create the basic graph. Then, girafe() will be used to generate an svg object to be displayed on an html page.
2.4 Interactivity
By hovering the mouse pointer on an data point of interest, the student’s ID will be displayed.
2.4.1 Displaying multiple information on tooltip
The content of the tooltip can be customised by including a list object as shown in the code chunk below.
exam_data$tooltip <- c(paste0(
"Name = ", exam_data$ID,
"\n Class = ", exam_data$CLASS))
p <- ggplot(data=exam_data,
aes(x = MATHS)) +
geom_dotplot_interactive(
aes(tooltip = exam_data$tooltip),
stackgroups = TRUE,
binwidth = 1,
method = "histodot") +
scale_y_continuous(NULL,
breaks = NULL)
girafe(
ggobj = p,
width_svg = 8,
height_svg = 8*0.618
)The first three lines of codes in the code chunk create a new field called tooltip. At the same time, it populates text in ID and CLASS fields into the newly created field. Next, this newly created field is used as tooltip field as shown in the code of line 7.
2.5 Interactivity
By hovering the mouse pointer on an data point of interest, the student’s ID, Class, and Gender will be displayed.
2.5.1 Customising Tooltip style
Code chunk below uses opts_tooltip() of ggiraph to customize tooltip rendering by add css declarations.
tooltip_css <- "background-color:white; #<<
font-style:bold; color:black;" #<<
p <- ggplot(data=exam_data,
aes(x = MATHS)) +
geom_dotplot_interactive(
aes(tooltip = ID),
stackgroups = TRUE,
binwidth = 1,
method = "histodot") +
scale_y_continuous(NULL,
breaks = NULL)
girafe(
ggobj = p,
width_svg = 6,
height_svg = 6*0.618,
options = list( #<<
opts_tooltip( #<<
css = tooltip_css)) #<<
)Notice that the background colour of the tooltip is black and the font colour is white and bold.
2.5.2 Displaying statistics on tooltip
Code chunk below shows an advanced way to customise tooltip. In this example, a function is used to compute 90% confident interval of the mean. The derived statistics are then displayed in the tooltip.
tooltip <- function(y, ymax, accuracy = .01) {
mean <- scales::number(y, accuracy = accuracy)
sem <- scales::number(ymax - y, accuracy = accuracy)
paste("Mean maths scores:", mean, "+/-", sem)
}
gg_point <- ggplot(data=exam_data,
aes(x = RACE),
) +
stat_summary(aes(y = MATHS,
tooltip = after_stat(
tooltip(y, ymax))),
fun.data = "mean_se",
geom = GeomInteractiveCol,
fill = "light blue"
) +
stat_summary(aes(y = MATHS),
fun.data = mean_se,
geom = "errorbar", width = 0.2, size = 0.2
)
girafe(ggobj = gg_point,
width_svg = 8,
height_svg = 8*0.618)2.5.2 Hover effect with data_id aesthetic
Code chunk below shows the second interactive feature of ggiraph, namely data_id.
p <- ggplot(data=exam_data,
aes(x = MATHS)) +
geom_dotplot_interactive(
aes(data_id = GENDER),
stackgroups = TRUE,
binwidth = 1,
method = "histodot") +
scale_y_continuous(NULL,
breaks = NULL)
girafe(
ggobj = p,
width_svg = 6,
height_svg = 6*0.618
) Interactivity: Elements associated with a data_id (i.e Gender) will be highlighted upon mouse over.
Note that the default value of the hover css is hover_css = “fill:orange;”.
2.5.4 Styling hover effect
In the code chunk below, css codes are used to change the highlighting effect.
p <- ggplot(data=exam_data,
aes(x = MATHS)) +
geom_dotplot_interactive(
aes(data_id = CLASS),
stackgroups = TRUE,
binwidth = 1,
method = "histodot") +
scale_y_continuous(NULL,
breaks = NULL)
girafe(
ggobj = p,
width_svg = 6,
height_svg = 6*0.618,
options = list(
opts_hover(css = "fill: #202020;"),
opts_hover_inv(css = "opacity:0.5;")
)
) Interactivity: Elements associated with a data_id (i.e CLASS) will be highlighted upon mouse over.
Note Different from previous example, in this example the ccs customisation request are encoded directly.
2.5.5 Combining tooltip and hover effect
There are time that we want to combine tooltip and hover effect on the interactive statistical graph as shown in the code chunk below.
p <- ggplot(exam_data,
aes(x = MATHS)) +
geom_dotplot_interactive(
aes(tooltip = CLASS,
data_id = CLASS),
stackgroups = TRUE,
binwidth = 1,
method = "histodot") +
scale_y_continuous(NULL,
breaks = NULL)
girafe(
ggobj = p,
width_svg = 6,
height_svg = 6*0.618,
options = list(
opts_hover(css = "fill: #202020;"),
opts_hover_inv(css = "opacity:0.2;")
)
)Interactivity: Elements associated with a data_id (i.e CLASS) will be highlighted upon mouse over. At the same time, the tooltip will show the CLASS.
2.5.6 Click effect with onclick
onclick argument of ggiraph provides hotlink interactivity on the web.
The code chunk below shown an example of onclick.
exam_data$onclick <- sprintf("window.open(\"%s%s\")",
"https://www.moe.gov.sg/schoolfinder?journey=Primary%20school",
as.character(exam_data$ID))
p <- ggplot(data=exam_data,
aes(x = MATHS)) +
geom_dotplot_interactive(
aes(onclick = onclick),
stackgroups = TRUE,
binwidth = 1,
method = "histodot") +
scale_y_continuous(NULL,
breaks = NULL)
girafe(
ggobj = p,
width_svg = 6,
height_svg = 6*0.618) Interactivity: Web document link with a data object will be displayed on the web browser upon mouse click.
2.5.7 Coordinated Multiple Views with ggiraph
Coordinated multiple views methods has been implemented in the data visualisation below.
p1 <- ggplot(data=exam_data,
aes(x = MATHS)) +
geom_dotplot_interactive(
aes(data_id = ID),
stackgroups = TRUE,
binwidth = 1,
method = "histodot") +
coord_cartesian(xlim=c(0,100)) +
scale_y_continuous(NULL,
breaks = NULL)
p2 <- ggplot(data=exam_data,
aes(x = ENGLISH)) +
geom_dotplot_interactive(
aes(data_id = ID),
stackgroups = TRUE,
binwidth = 1,
method = "histodot") +
coord_cartesian(xlim=c(0,100)) +
scale_y_continuous(NULL,
breaks = NULL)
girafe(code = print(p1 + p2),
width_svg = 6,
height_svg = 3,
options = list(
opts_hover(css = "fill: #202020;"),
opts_hover_inv(css = "opacity:0.2;")
)
) Notice that when a data point of one of the dotplot is selected, the corresponding data point ID on the second data visualisation will be highlighted too.
In order to build a coordinated multiple views as shown in the example above, the following programming strategy will be used:
Appropriate interactive functions of ggiraph will be used to create the multiple views.
*patchwork*function ofpatchworkpackage will be used inside girafe function to create the interactive coordinated multiple views.
The data_id aesthetic is critical to link observations between plots and the tooltip aesthetic is optional but nice to have when mouse over a point.
2.6 Interactive Data Visualisation - plotly methods!
Plotly’s R graphing library create interactive web graphics from ggplot2 graphs and/or a custom interface to the (MIT-licensed) JavaScript library plotly.js inspired by the grammar of graphics. Different from other plotly platform, plot.R is free and open source.
There are two ways to create interactive graph by using plotly, they are:
by using plot_ly(), and
by using ggplotly()
2.6.1 Creating an interactive scatter plot: plot_ly() method
Here’s an example a basic interactive plot created by using plot_ly().
plot_ly(data = exam_data,
x = ~MATHS,
y = ~ENGLISH)2.6.2 Working with visual variable: plot_ly() method
In the code chunk below, color argument is mapped to a qualitative visual variable (i.e. RACE).
- ::: panel-tabset ## The Plot
The Code
plot_ly(exam_data,
x = ~MATHS,
y = ~ENGLISH,
color = ~RACE)2.6.3 Creating an interactive scatter plot: ggplotly() method
The code chunk below plots an interactive scatter plot by using ggplotly().
p <- ggplot(data=exam_data,
aes(x = MATHS,
y = ENGLISH,
color = RACE)) +
geom_point(size=1) +
coord_cartesian(xlim=c(0,100),
ylim=c(0,100))
ggplotly(p)Notice that the only extra line you need to include in the code chunk is ggplotly().
2.6.4 Coordinated Multiple Views with plotly
The creation of a coordinated linked plot by using plotly involves three steps:
highlight_key()of plotly package is used as shared data.two scatterplots will be created by using ggplot2 functions.
lastly,
subplot()of plotly package is used to place them next to each other side-by-side.
Click on a data point of one of the scatterplot and see how the corresponding point on the other scatterplot is selected.
Thing to learn from the code:
highlight_key() simply creates an object of class crosstalk::SharedData.
Visit this link to learn more about crosstalk
2.7 Interactive Data Visualisation - crosstalk methods!
Crosstalk is an add-on to the htmlwidgets package. It extends htmlwidgets with a set of classes, functions, and conventions for implementing cross-widget interactions (currently, linked brushing and filtering).
2.7.1 Interactive Data Table: DT package
A wrapper of the JavaScript Library DataTables
Data objects in R can be rendered as HTML tables using the JavaScript library ‘DataTables’ (typically via R Markdown or Shiny).
DT::datatable(exam_data, class= "compact")2.7.2 Linked brushing: crosstalk method
d <- highlight_key(exam_data)
p <- ggplot(d,
aes(ENGLISH,
MATHS)) +
geom_point(size=1) +
coord_cartesian(xlim=c(0,100),
ylim=c(0,100))
gg <- highlight(ggplotly(p),
"plotly_selected")
crosstalk::bscols(gg,
DT::datatable(d),
widths = 5) Things to learn from the code chunk:
highlight() is a function of plotly package. It sets a variety of options for brushing (i.e., highlighting) multiple plots. These options are primarily designed for linking multiple plotly graphs, and may not behave as expected when linking plotly to another htmlwidget package via crosstalk. In some cases, other htmlwidgets will respect these options, such as persistent selection in leaflet.
bscols() is a helper function of crosstalk package. It makes it easy to put HTML elements side by side. It can be called directly from the console but is especially designed to work in an R Markdown document. Warning: This will bring in all of Bootstrap!.
PART II: 3.0 Programming Animated Statistical Graphics with R
3.1 Overview
When telling a visually-driven data story, animated graphics tends to attract the interest of the audience and make deeper impression than static graphics. In this hands-on exercise, you will learn how to create animated data visualisation by using gganimate and plotly r packages. At the same time, you will also learn how to (i) reshape data by using tidyr package, and (ii) process, wrangle and transform data by using dplyr package.
3.2 Getting Started
3.2.1 Loading the R Packages
pacman::p_load(readxl, gifski, gapminder,
plotly, gganimate, tidyverse)3.2.2 Importing data
col <- c("Country", "Continent")
globalPop <- read_xls("data/GlobalPopulation.xls",
sheet="Data") %>%
mutate_at(col, as.factor) %>%
mutate(Year = as.integer(Year))Things to learn from the code chunk above
read_xls() of readxl package is used to import the Excel worksheet.
mutate_at() of dplyr package is used to convert all character data type into factor.
mutate of dplyr package is used to convert data values of Year field into integer.
3.3 Animated Data Visualisation: gganimate methods
gganimate extends the grammar of graphics as implemented by ggplot2 to include the description of animation. It does this by providing a range of new grammar classes that can be added to the plot object in order to customise how it should change with time.
transition_*()defines how the data should be spread out and how it relates to itself across time.view_*()defines how the positional scales should change along the animation.shadow_*()defines how data from other points in time should be presented in the given point in time.enter_*()/exit_*()defines how new data should appear and how old data should disappear during the course of the animation.ease_aes()defines how different aesthetics should be eased during transitions.
3.3.1 Building a static population bubble plot
In the code chunk below, the basic ggplot2 functions are used to create a static bubble plot.
ggplot(globalPop, aes(x = Old, y = Young,
size = Population,
colour = Country)) +
geom_point(alpha = 0.7,
show.legend = FALSE) +
scale_colour_manual(values = country_colors) +
scale_size(range = c(2, 12)) +
labs(title = 'Year: {frame_time}',
x = '% Aged',
y = '% Young')
3.3.2 Building the animated bubble plot
In the code chunk below,
transition_time()of gganimate is used to create transition through distinct states in time (i.e. Year).ease_aes()is used to control easing of aesthetics. The default islinear. Other methods are: quadratic, cubic, quartic, quintic, sine, circular, exponential, elastic, back, and bounce.
ggplot(globalPop, aes(x = Old, y = Young,
size = Population,
colour = Country)) +
geom_point(alpha = 0.7,
show.legend = FALSE) +
scale_colour_manual(values = country_colors) +
scale_size(range = c(2, 12)) +
labs(title = 'Year: {frame_time}',
x = '% Aged',
y = '% Young') +
transition_time(Year) +
ease_aes('linear') 
The animated bubble chart
3.4 Animated Data Visualisation: plotly
In Plotly R package, both ggplotly() and plot_ly() support key frame animations through the frame argument/aesthetic. They also support an ids argument/aesthetic to ensure smooth transitions between objects with the same id (which helps facilitate object constancy).
3.4.1 Building an animated bubble plot: ggplotly() method
In this sub-section, you will learn how to create an animated bubble plot by using ggplotly() method.
The animated bubble plot above includes a play/pause button and a slider component for controlling the animation ## The Code
animate <- ggplot(globalPop,
aes(x = Old,
y = Young,
size = Population,
colour = Country)) +
geom_point(aes(size = Population,
frame = Year),
alpha = 0.7,
show.legend = FALSE) +
scale_colour_manual(values = country_colors) +
scale_size(range = c(2, 12)) +
labs(x = '% Aged',
y = '% Young')
ggplotly(animate)Things to learn from the code chunk above
Appropriate ggplot2 functions are used to create a static bubble plot. The output is then saved as an R object called animate.
ggplotly()is then used to convert the R graphic object into an animated svg object.
Notice that although show.legend = FALSE argument was used, the legend still appears on the plot. To overcome this problem, theme(legend.position='none') should be used as shown in the plot and code chunk belo
animate <- ggplot(globalPop,
aes(x = Old,
y = Young,
size = Population,
colour = Country)) +
geom_point(aes(size = Population,
frame = Year),
alpha = 0.7,
show.legend = FALSE) +
scale_colour_manual(values = country_colors) +
scale_size(range = c(2, 12)) +
labs(x = '% Aged',
y = '% Young') +
theme(legend.position='none')
ggplotly(animate)3.4.2 Building an animated bubble plot: plot_ly() method
In this sub-section, you will learn how to create an animated bubble plot by using plot_ly() method.